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It Looked So Good On Paper

`Frankenstein' Remake Lacks Crucial Spark

November 04, 1994|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic.

It's tempting to say that, in making his lavish, wildly ambitious new version of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," director-star Kenneth Branagh has matched the hubris of his own role, ill-fated life-creator and monster-maker Victor Frankenstein. It's tempting to say that Branagh has taken patches and gobs from dozens of dead, ill-matched sources, stitched them together with feverish intensity and reckless wizardry and produced a monster: a great twitching, brainsick, prodigious, persecuted hulk of a movie that is neither dead nor alive, part horrific, part piteous.

In fact, Branagh's "Frankenstein"-with himself as the "mad scientist" and Robert De Niro as his hapless creation, in a sumptuous Francis Ford Coppola production-is a disappointment. It's a film that may chill us less than exhaust us. On a basic level, it doesn't hang together, doesn't awaken the nightmarish fear and shocks of, say, the 1931 James Whale-Boris Karloff version.

By contrast, Branagh's movie-though a prodigy of cinematography (by Roger Pratt) and design, with brilliant actors-seems too hectic and packed, a stylistic over-reacher. Yet this movie-a companion-piece to Coppola's 1992 "Bram Stoker's Dracula"-can inspire admiration even as it dumbfounds you.

Horror movies, like comedies, are often judged solely on the immediate response, a mistake. And this one has plenty the others don't. Like "Bram Stoker's Dracula," it's a deliberately literary construction, spiced up with modern psychological-social twists. It follows more faithfully its source: Mary Shelley's 19th Century Gothic version of the Greek Prometheus legend, her tale of an obsessed scientist who manufactures life (a creature made from corpses) and then sees it turn on him.

Both movies make their "villains"-Count Dracula and Frankenstein's monster-more sympathetic than usual. But though there's little literary justification for softening Dracula (Stoker's Count was an unmitigated blood-engorged fiend), Mary Shelley's monster was nicer from the start. Unlike the classic lurching Karloff archetype, with its square, seamed forehead and neck-bolts, the novel's creature is articulate, idealistic, compassionate, so desperate for love and understanding he kills when they're denied him.

Every other "Frankenstein" picture, however ludicrous, tries, even if briefly, to make us feel the menace of the walking dead. Here, the primary terror of the picture lies in the Job-like sufferings of the monster himself: the ways his creator abandons him, life torments him.

As powerfully played by De Niro-under layers of latex makeup that actually suggest a misshapen being stitched together from chunks of corpses-the monster is like some ultimate bastard proletariat son rejected by his aristocrat father: a victim turned vengeful killer. De Niro does the role with such weight, gravity and overpowering sadness that he chills the movie down whenever he appears.

It's a world of 18th Century European aristocracy that resembles Fragonard's paintings: full of light, airy ballrooms, fops, carriages, the rich at play. And the monster's world, by contrast, is the world of the poor and disinherited: a Hogarthian domain of mud, blood, plague, poverty, injustice, early death and brief evanescent bursts of happiness.

That's what's different about Branagh's movie: its class-consciousness. He's made the overtly anti-ruling class, anti-rationalist cautionary fable that young Mary Godwin-the 19-year-old lover (and later wife) of rebel poet Percy Shelley when she conceived and wrote most of the book-only partly realized. Mary Shelley wrote about re-animating the dead because the thought terrified her. But having made the monster, she shows a mother's sympathy. The movie, a bit too calculated, lacks her instinctual intensity.

Kenneth Branagh made a staggering star-directorial debut with his 1990 "Henry V." He took on the British cinema and stage's most untouchable icon, Laurence Olivier, and beat him at his own game by remaking (and improving) Olivier's 1944 Shakespearean classic. But all three of the features he's made since-the American "reincarnation" thriller "Dead Again," the British reunion comedy "Peter's Friends" and a second Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing"-sometimes seem overpowered by their own direction. Branagh's flying cameras, overripe casts, juicy scripts-his sheer creative exuberance-sometimes suggest Orson Welles' cinematic electric train gone mad.